More Of What To Look Forward To At XDS2010

There is just over two months left until the 2010 X.Org Developers' Summit taking place in Toulouse, France. There's just over 30 registered participants at this time and not much has changed since the reminder a few weeks back, but a few more of the sessions have been expressed.

One of the talks is being called "Kill It With Fire" and it's about deciding what graphics hardware to actively support by X.Org with KMS, EXA, and other key Linux graphics features. Obviously the strong focus is on supporting Intel, ATI/AMD, and NVIDIA (via Nouveau) hardware, but there's other hardware out there and there's even work on a KMS driver for old 3Dlabs graphics cards that are more than a decade old. There's also Linux users with other old or obscure graphics hardware looking for modern graphics support, such as was just expressed a few hours ago in our forums.

Another talk added recently for XDS2010 is reviewing the latest DRI2 protocol additions, such as the protocol requests and swap events. This DRI2 talk is being led by Intel's Jesse Barnes.

Similar to the X.Org Server 1.10 planning session, there are also plans in the XDS2010 program to discuss the new X.Org development model. For X.Org Server 1.8 and X.Org Server 1.9 this new development model -- that makes it more like how Linus Torvalds maintains the Linux kernel -- appears to be working better than their previous efforts and at least they are closer to releasing on-time. Also going to be discussed is on branching the X.Org Server with master versus stable and the possibility of creating a xorg-server-next branch, similar to what's done with the linux-next tree as a place for patches to land prior to their inclusion in the next release cycle.

Last but not least, a multi-touch session is planned. This is a three day summit so more sessions will certainly come up like usual as the event nears.

The current XDS2010 program can be found on the X.Org Wiki along with the attendee list. There will be coverage on Phoronix of this summit taking place at the University of Toulouse (no developers will be raiding the zoo this time) from the 16th to 18th of September.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.